Museums and Wealth

de Nizan Shaked

"A focus on the museum as a model institution of the liberal nation state can reveal much about the ethics of where, why, and how, the public sector meets private interest. In a non-profit institution, the category of "the public" plays a role in establishing the symbolic value of art, yet this is what sustains its markets and its monetary value; the public is therefore a necessary component in art's profit potential, especially since art began yielding super-profits in the late 20th century. A shift in the structure and operation of non-profit institutions, following the economic crash of 2008, has accelerated the growth of the art market and the museum boom, affecting the economy and meaning of contemporary art in the 21st century. Shaked lays out and critiques the set of unprecedented historical conditions that have been converging since the 1970s, while reverting to models of criteria and judgment that existed in the 16th century, to demonstrate the exacerbated ethical problems we now face in the funding and operations of nonprofit museums. Through a Historical Materialism critique, observing the art object as both an historical object and as one produced in contemporary conditions, this book describes the collection, the market, and the institution as a set of social relations to get a total picture of the meaning of art within this oscillating constellation of social and monetary relations. Art moves from the level of individual or small-scale making, through the circulation systems of market and media, to the museum-the institution that confers the possibility of value in the name of the public. To understand this dynamic, Shaked traces the path of the art object, viewing it not as an individual object, part of an artist's oeuvre, or representative of a school, but in the context of the "public collection" as a category. Comparing different definitions and theories of value allows this book to connect historical, political, aesthetic, theoretical, and economic paradigms of inquiry."--